About Jack Womack Jack Womack. Our guest tonight will be Jack Womack. What followsis John Clute's article on him from the Encyclopedia of Science http://www.omnimag.com/archives/chats/bios/womack.html

Extractions: Our guest tonight will be Jack Womack. What follows is John Clute's article on him from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (available in paperback and CD-ROM). Jack Womack (1956- ) US writer whose first 5 novels are stylish and potent exercises in a post-cyberpunk urban idiom, and comprise the first instalments in a loose ongoing series about the near-future state of the USA. The sequence, reminiscent at points of the baroque New York detective fictions of Jerry Oster (1943- ), is projected to stop after 5 vols. Ambient (1987), set in the complexly desolated warzone which New York has become in the early 21st century, evokes comparisons with James Joyce (1882-1941) and Anthony Burgess in its sensuous, choked, eloquent, linguistically foregrounded presentation of the victims of a radioactive accident who populate the fringes of the fragmented city, and who so hypnotically manifest the Goyaesque horrors of the scene that volunteer "normals" mutilate themselves and join the ranks of the sinking. In the story itself, however, JW exhibits a certain lack of plotting imagination, and neither tycoon Thatcher Dryden nor the megacorporation, Dryco, which he runs nearly singlehanded are particularly convincing when set against the mise en scene. Out of that venue, the protagonists of Terraplane (1988) hurtle pastwards into an alternate-world version of late-1930s New York, an apartheid-ridden dystopia the oppressed lives of Black Americans are described with haunting intimacy whose vileness may, or may not, be seen as worse than the radiation-corrupted, corporation-dominated nightmarishness of our own new era.

Extractions: (Atlantic Grove Monthly) Our hero is Maxim Alexeich Borodin, an entrepreneur in Russia's fledgling capitalist economy, where anything is permissble for a price. Borodin's booming business is the Universal Manufacturing Company, which specializes in the production of forged documents. Business is good but Borodin must contend with rival mafias, government corruption, and the general greed of Russia's new capitalist class. While Womack made his name in science fiction with Elvissy, there's little speculation in Let's Put the Future Behind Us, excepting a few brief musings on the flexible nature of reality at the Universal Manufacturing Company ("We can prove that John Kennedy shot himself," Borodin proclaims, "providing we're paid in advance.") Womack chooses, instead, to expend his efforts on observing the human machine Womack shows the new Russia as a hardscrabble immitator of early American capitalism. In this comparison,Let's Put the Future Behind Us serves as a sly slap to not only the modern Russian experience, but also to western idealogues who see the future of capitalism in a return to the cut throat ehtics of yore. A quick moving plot, and a central character Max Borodin, who is any corrupt, bribing businessman of early American capitalism, but built for lovin', makes Let's Put the Future Behind Us a fun romp, in places, evoking the same pleasure as Stranger in a Strange Land did the first time round.

Jack Womack Jack Womack Science Fiction author, but they never put his stuff inthe science fiction section. I got this one by accident. I bought http://www.bway.net/~dominicl/womack.html

Extractions: Parents: Ann Truitt Karrenbrock and Jack Womack, Sr. "Jack Womack was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1956, of poor, because honest, forebears. His childhood, best left to an imagination other than his own, could be called Kafkaesque would it not be a disservice to Kafka. Emerging unscathed from the effects of a haphazard education he moved to New York, which city he finds less inhospitable than the rest of the United States. In Womack's novels, New York is strange and unsettling, a city of joy and pain, horror and transcendence. "Having worked in bookshops for twelve years, Mr Womack harbours no illusions as to the more practical concerns of his art. The only influences upon his writing to whom he will admit are Shirley Jackson and Charles Fort. "'Weird compared to what?' is the precept by which Mr Womack has always found himself living. When not writing he occupies himself smoking, shopping, hanging around with women, smoking, reading, drinking and smoking. One day he intends to quit smoking. He feels a sinner in the paws of an unstable God". [publisher's bumpf] Winner of the 1994 Philip K.Dick Memorial Award for his novel

Extractions: Strange Book of the Month Club NASA Mooned America! by R. Ren, ( self-published, 1995, $25 (send check to: R.Ren, 31 Burgess Place, Passaic, NJ 07055) A book in the grand tradition of William Kaysing's We Never Went to the Moon . Expelled Mensa member Ren pulls no punches, spills all beans, and proves that the Apollo flights were hoaxes perpetrated solely to increase government funding for NASA. (We shall hereafter use the derisive term astro-nots when speaking of the NASA actors who lied about going to the moon.) Ren (call him, affectionately, Astro-Nut ) makes a point of citing only secondary sources (books written by astronots, newspaper articles, backs of cereal boxes) for information - "not having a suicidal urge, I refrained from blandly traipsing in the government archives." As well he should: Ren puts the likes of less inventive conspiratologists to shame when he uncovers that NASA, as an agency, exists solely to rub out its own employees - astronots and secretaries alike - if they threaten to reveal too much of the real story.